Proceedings of the CUNY Games Conference 4.0: The Interactive Course

Proceedings of the CUNY Games Conference, held from January 22-23, 2018, at the CUNY Graduate Center and Borough of Manhattan Community College. Critical Play with History (Panel) - Composition & Storytelling - Health & Cognitive Sciences - Gaming Anthropology: Teaching Culture and Power Through Games and Design (Panel) - Twine & Writing Games - Easy Ideas II - STEM Games - Global Games for Change Catalog (Panel) - Comics & Active Learning - Fact Checking & Research - Computer Science & Game Design - SimGlobal: Building a Serious Roleplay Course for the Social Sciences (Panel) - Role Playing Games, Narrative, & Story - Course Review Through Games - Business & Finance Games - Game Design and Programming in Unity - What’s Your Game Plan? - The Allure of Play in the Classroo

Creativity in the cane fields: motivating and engaging IT students through games

In this paper we discuss the influence of the unique local environment and culture on students and teaching styles in the IT degree at James Cook University Cairns Campus. In this degree program games are used to motivate self-directed study and increase student engagement in first and second year programming subjects, and also to generate interest in learning new technologies such as programming for mobile devices. We discuss the use of a mixed reality location based game to improve attitude to teamwork by integrating students in a games subject and a general IT software engineering subject. Students learn the value of community engagement through links to a local primary school for design and evaluation of games, to ensure a balanced approach to user requirements, game design and implementation. Students have explored niche applications of games through the development of a game for children with disabilities

Learning to communicate computationally with Flip: a bi-modal programming language for game creation

Teaching basic computational concepts and skills to school children is currently a curricular focus in many countries. Running parallel to this trend are advances in programming environments and teaching methods which aim to make computer science more accessible, and more motivating. In this paper, we describe the design and evaluation of Flip, a programming language that aims to help 11–15 year olds develop computational skills through creating their own 3D role-playing games. Flip has two main components: 1) a visual language (based on an interlocking blocks design common to many current visual languages), and 2) a dynamically updating natural language version of the script under creation. This programming-language/natural-language pairing is a unique feature of Flip, designed to allow learners to draw upon their familiarity with natural language to “decode the code”. Flip aims to support young people in developing an understanding of computational concepts as well as the skills to use and communicate these concepts effectively. This paper investigates the extent to which Flip can be used by young people to create working scripts, and examines improvements in their expression of computational rules and concepts after using the tool. We provide an overview of the design and implementation of Flip before describing an evaluation study carried out with 12–13 year olds in a naturalistic setting. Over the course of 8 weeks, the majority of students were able to use Flip to write small programs to bring about interactive behaviours in the games they created. Furthermore, there was a significant improvement in their computational communication after using Flip (as measured by a pre/post-test). An additional finding was that girls wrote more, and more complex, scripts than did boys, and there was a trend for girls to show greater learning gains relative to the boys

Promoting Computer Science with Video Games: Teaching Object-Oriented Programming through Unity

In recent years, the demand for people educated in computer science has continued to grow as the possible applications of software expand. For this reason, it is important to not only offer young adults the ability to learn computer science, but also to intrigue them with interesting and engaging applications of computer science. Organizations, such as the CollegeBoard and Exploring Computer Science, have been working to make computer science education more available and desirable to younger audiences. This project contributes to these goals by creating and implementing a curriculum for teaching object-oriented programming to high school students through video game programming. Students were taught how to use a third-party game engine called Unity to create complex 3D games. The curriculum was designed to provide students with a basic understanding of the tools and concepts they needed to make a game, and provided students with several hours of learning time to create their own games. This course was taught at San Luis Obispo High School to a group of 20 students. A survey was taken by 14 of the 20 students before and after the course. This survey revealed that half of the students who did not understand objects in programming before the course did understand objects after the course. The survey also showed that many students were able to learn C#, an object oriented programming language, during the course. Lastly, most of the students ended the course with a completed project that could be added to a portfolio

Python game design for children: Games and programming resources

This project is focused on helping middle and high school students learn how to program and think computationally. We are creating a set of resources that will be used by the students to understand programming, Python, and PyGames concepts. These resources will be used for teaching the two one-week summer camps through Clemson University\u27s Pre-Collegiate programs in June and July 2014. This camp has been offered at Georgia Tech and Clemson University for two summers using a drag and drop visual programming language to help students create games. The instructors have found that the camp attendees do not find the visual programming language to be challenging enough. Thus, we are designing curricula to teach introductory computing concepts with the Python and PyGames programming languages in a fun and creative way and to give students the opportunity to learn to design and program their own games. We are also designing and creating our own games as a way to learn the language and have examples for the kids in the camp to build upon. This project was initiated this semester and we will pilot resources this summer during the two weeks of camp. We will showcase the initial games and resources created for this project

Enhancing the learning experience- Use of video game technology for teaching Japanese language

The Japanese language is challenging to learn, especially for native speakers of Indo- European languages. The three components of written Japanese -- Hiragana, Katakana, and Kanji – include 2,136 Kanji characters, and 46 each for Katakana and Hiragana. Teaching Japanese – generally through repetition – can lead to student boredom and affect success. Research shows that video games can at least provide a more enjoyable learning experience. Despite this fact, there are a lack of video games for teaching Japanese characters. Using the Unity game engine and the C# programming language, a video game for enhancing the learning of students studying Japanese as a second language was created. Users must identify the Japanese characters as they trickle from top to bottom on the screen. The more times the user identifies a particular Japanese character, the less that character will appear. The reverse applies to incorrect answers – the character will appear more often. This is a key learning technique as the user is forced to repeat those characters he/she does not know. This project demonstrates that the dearth of available, effective video games to complement foreign language learning can be overcome. Basic programming skills combined with some creative design, and a strong desire to help others learn, can result in simple but effective video games. The interactive experience will certainly improve students’ ability to learn this challenging language

Teacher perspectives on introducing programming constructs through coding mobile-based game to secondary school students

Programming is one of the most important aspects of a Computing course. Teaching programming is a challenging task due to a number of factors, ranging from lack of student problem solving skills to different teaching methods. This paper focuses on Maltese Computing teachers’ perspectives about the difficulties encountered when teaching programming to secondary school students in order to determine whether introducing programming to secondary school students through creating mobile-based games is an effective method to teach programming constructs. A resource pack consisting of various activities using MIT App Inventor 2 was created which incorporated constructivist approaches to teaching. This resource pack was reviewed by the teachers and their feedback was collected by means of a case study. The teachers agreed that developing mobile-based games would be highly stimulating to their students but there were uncertainties how this would affect students with different learning abilities and due to a general lack of computational thinking and problem-solving skills by most students.peer-reviewe